The cost of a phone agent’s smile

Humans who answer the phones in call centers are, in many organizations, requested or even required to smile, smile, smile. A team of researchers at Goethe-University Frankfurt in Germany and the University of Denver ran an experiment to see what this forced smiling does to the forced smilers…. —so begins today’s Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on […]

Smirkness in Economics

Those who follow developments in the derivatives market, and particularly in its sub-section, the options market, may be aware of the concept of Smirkness. It was first proposed at the 2005 China International Conference in Finance, where professors Jin Zhang and Yi Xiang presented their paper ‘Implied Volatility Smirk’ “In this paper, we propose a new […]

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